My mom, Judy Dunn, and sisters, Heather and Jancee, have consistently given me feedback on all my writing—I am lucky to have their help. And I am also fortunate to have a terrific editor, Amanda Shih, who asks all the right questions.
Photo courtesy of Judy Dunn
Dinah Williams is an editor and children’s book author who is fascinated by odd and unusual stories. Her nonfiction books for children include Terrible But True: Awful Events in American History; Secrets of Walt Disney World: Weird and Wonderful Facts About the Most Magical Place on Earth; Abandoned Amusement Parks; and Spooky Cemeteries, which won the 2009 Children’s Choice Award. She lives in beautiful Cranford, New Jersey, with her husband, two daughters, and two cats, none of whom enjoys a scary story.
For more terrifying but true tales, turn the page for a sneak peek of True Hauntings: Deadly Disasters
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The history of the Japanese port city of Ishinomaki was fairly uneventful—no big fires, no bombing during World War II, no significant damage from earthquakes. The last major disaster had been a tsunami in 869 AD, which killed more than a thousand people but happened so long ago it feels like ancient history.
That changed on March 11, 2011. At 2:46 in the afternoon, the ground began to shake. While earthquakes are fairly common in Japan, this one was huge, lasting nearly ten minutes. Warnings went out across the country that a tsunami was coming. Residents were told to leave immediately and get to higher ground. But so many of these warnings had been sent out over the years that people didn’t panic.
They should have—a wave of death was heading their way.
Less than a half hour later, Ishinomaki was engulfed by a massive tsunami, which flattened the town. Nearly 6,000 people were killed by the towering wave and 29,000 lost their homes. Those who survived were devastated by the damage and mourned the loss of family, friends, and neighbors.
As crushed buildings and other debris were removed from the streets and electricity was restored, the taxi services began to get some strange calls. Drivers would pick up passengers, only to have them vanish during the ride.
In one instance, a driver picked up a woman who asked to go to an area totally destroyed during the tsunami. He told her there was nothing left there to visit. “Have I died?” she asked him. When he turned to look at her, the back seat of his taxi was empty.
The island of Japan is located above underground plates that shift and collide, causing earthquakes to happen fairly often. However, the one that occurred in 2011 was anything but ordinary. Registered at 9.0 on the Richter scale, which measures the strength of earthquakes, it was the largest in Japan’s history and the fourth largest in recorded history. This massive quake off the east coast was so strong it actually moved the entire country four feet closer to the United States.
While the quake was terrible, the tsunami that came less than an hour later was worse. More than 120 feet tall in places, the wave swept in from the sea and destroyed everything in its wake for nearly six miles inland.
The tsunami battered nearly 217 miles of the Pacific coast of Japan, wiping out sources for electricity, gas, and clean water. One reporter said that the wave “was mixed with mud, with ships and cars smashing toward wooden houses, dragging those into rice fields, and basically bashing them into pieces.”
Ryo Kanouya was inside his house when the tsunami struck. He told National Geographic that he thought he was going to drown when the water reached his ceiling.
The tsunami bursting into the city of Miyako.
“The next moment I heard [a] cracking sound made by my home’s destruction … I was drained from my house into the soup of seawater, cars, houses, and everything the tsunami carried. To my surprise, I was able to reach the surface … Luckily a drawer for clothes came floating toward me and I climbed onto it.”
Ryo and the drawer were being sucked out into the ocean with the receding wave. When he floated by a tree, Ryo held on to the branches. He stayed in the tree until the water went back out and he could climb down.
“When we entered the disaster area, words failed us,” a man named Shunji told Watchtower magazine about his home in Ishinomaki. “Cars were hanging off electric poles, houses were piled one on top of the other, and the debris was piled up even higher than the houses. On the roof of a car, we saw a dead body, probably a person who was unable to survive the cold night. Another car was upside down and hanging between houses. There was a body inside it.”
The earthquake and tsunami caused nearly 16,000 deaths and $220 billion in damage in Japan, as well as a nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station. Where were once bustling neighborhoods, there were only piles of smashed houses, stores, schools, and cars. As people began to dig out, bury, and mourn the dead, they found that some weren’t ready for their lives to be over.
A man rests while digging out the rubble where his house once stood.
In traditional Japanese culture, ghosts are not uncommon. Some religions believe that when a person dies and their soul leaves the body, certain rituals need to be performed so that it can join its ancestors in the afterlife. If someone dies suddenly or violently or the rituals are not performed, the spirit becomes stuck on Earth. Many of these ghosts are trapped near where they died until they have been given a proper burial.
After the tsunami, a number of restless spirits were seen in the areas it had hit. Ghosts were spotted in wrecked grocery stores and in the rubble that once was homes. Other spirits were seen running in fear as if from a wave, only to disappear. Ambulances and taxis received phantom calls from areas where no buildings were left standing.
A Japanese print from an 1812 play that featured the ghost of a murdered woman.
Some who survived claimed to be approached by people they knew were dead, only to have them vanish into the air. One man saw the eyes of the many dead staring at him from rain puddles. The ghost of an old woman from Onagawa came to one of the recovery centers for tea. Those who saw her said they felt so bad for her that they didn’t tell her she was dead. When she disappeared, she left behind a seat wet with seawater.
A number of the spirits, furious about their terrible deaths, were said to possess the living. Priests in the Buddhist and Shinto religions were asked to perform exorcisms, which is a ceremony that expels an evil spirit from a living person. Journalist Richard Lloyd Parry detailed how one man who had visited the area devastated by the wave became possessed. He crawled around on all fours making animal noises and rolled on the floor, yelling, “You must die. You must die. Everyone must die. Everything must die and be lost.” His behavior continued to be so strange that his wife brought him to a priest, who helped rid him of the angry spirit.
Another woman couldn’t escape the spirits all around her, telling a writer, “There are headless ghosts, and some missing hands and legs. Others are completely cut in half. People were killed in so many different ways during the disaster and they were left like that in death too.”
While crews gradually cleared the devastated areas of debris and the areas began to recover, many of the spirits of the thousands lost in the disaster were never put to rest. They haunt the country still.
This book includes quoted material from primary source documents, some of which contains racially offensive language. These passages are presented in their original, unedited form in order to accurately reflect history.
Copyright © 2021 by Dinah Dunn
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
First edition, Augu
st 2021
Cover art © 2021 by Shane Rebenschied
Cover design by Christopher Stengel
e-ISBN 978-1-338-75735-4
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